The World Economic Forum has published the 12th Edition of its Global Risks Report for 2017 – with environmental concerns more prominent than ever and water flagged up as a key risk. For the past seven editions of the report, a cluster of interconnected environment-related risks – including extreme weather events, climate change and water crises – has consistently featured among the top-ranked global risks.

The report says that the environmental category in the Global Risks Perception Survey (GRPS) of the report this year stands out in the GRPS. This year all five risks in this category are assessed as being above average for both impact and likelihood.  Every risk in the category lies in the higher-impact, higher-likelihood quadrant.

“Over the course of the past decade, a cluster of environment-related risks – notably extreme weather events and failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation as well as water crises – has emerged as a consistently central feature of the GRPS risk landscape, strongly interconnected with many other risks, such as conflict and migration.”, the report says.

However, it goes on to suggest that centralized networks are costly to create, and the balance of costs and benefits is beginning to tip in favour of distributed water systems if cities can be planned for these systems from the outset.

Click here to download the report in full.